We often rush to take action and do something, but when was the last time you allowed things to slow down a bit? Shahmeen Sadiq, an executive coach, and founder of Anjali Leadership, joins Melanie Parish, to share what it is about staying present and being self-aware that help mold a true leader. Sharing her insights on some social issues, Shahmeen points out that people wanted to move things quickly and help out when all she wanted was to sit a little longer. She tells Melanie about Power Pause, a space she created where people can come, get centered, tune inward, and see what emerges. It’s the beauty of staying present and being aware of themselves that will allow them to deal with an unexpected crisis, difficult people, and events. This is the same with grooming leaders as Shahmeen says, boils down to staying grounded and helping people not be invisible by starting authentic conversations and not just the leader trying to make things better.  

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Listen to the podcast here

How Staying Present And Being Self-Aware Help You Become A Great Leader With Shahmeen Sadiq 

I have been thinking about my own leadership and how I approach things that I don’t know how to approach. When it’s a product and all of that in my own company, it’s safe but when I start to think about race and how I interact with things that scare me a little, I have to take a deep breath and leap over an edge. I find conversations about racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia to be so challenging and difficult. I want to wade into the water but I find myself afraid that I’ll get it wrong. I am promising myself that I’m going to flail, dig deep, and try to walk into spaces that are not always comfortable to me. I don’t think I can get any better at it if I don’t engage. 

For me, my leadership journey is about asking questions that are hard, inviting people to deeper conversations that I haven’t had before, and asking the questions. I do some prep before I go to those places. My guests on my show are always in agreement. They’ve given me consent to talk about these hard places. I don’t feel like someone who has a different experience with racism, gender, homophobia, or transphobia, I don’t assume that it’s their job to teach me. I only go to these places with permission for myself and with my white guess. I’m committed to doing white people work. I hope that you are finding places where you leap headlong into difficult and challenging conversations. What kinds of places are you looking to see how you can deepen your own leadership? What are the places that are scary for you to go to? I hope you challenge yourself regularly.  

I’m here with Shahmeen Sadiq. She’s been an executive coach and a leadership consultant since 2005 when she founded Anjali Leadership in Toronto. She teaches leaders how to relate to others with exquisite self-awareness and grace courageously. It’s her privilege to work with leaders from a wide variety of industries including insurance, government consulting, healthcare, education, banking, hospitality and faith organizations. She served as adjunct Leadership Faculty at the University of Notre Dame since 2013. From 2008 to 2019, she was a faculty member of The Leadership Circle, where she certified and mentored about 1,000 coaches across the US and Canada. It is great to have Shahmeen on my show.  

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Hello, Shahmeen.  

Hello, Melanie. 

We have a long history. You and I did some of the work that I am most proud of in my whole life in 2008. It’s a long time ago but I love the work. We did some work with The First Unitarian Church of Hamilton. They were awarded a Prism Award, which I’m still quite proud. In that work, we were working with an entire congregation of 250 people, large group processes, having people, hearing voices, and 60 people in a room. Back in it, I almost can’t believe we did that work.  

It was amazing. I have fond memories of it too. It was so much fun.  

It was both challenging, also thrilling, edges all over the place, trying to find the right content to help them talk to each other, and all of that. We’re going to dive in. I always love talking about experimenting and leadership. I know you’ve been trying some pretty cool things in 2020. I’ll start with that. How have you been experimenting? What are you up to in your own work?  

To link back to that work, we did in 2008 to what I’m going to talk about is courage. I feel like what we were doing then was very courageous. We have applied things that we’ve learned but we hadn’t had the chance to apply them at least in a large group. There is something cool about that. For me, when the pandemic hit in March 2020, I’m very tuned into what’s happening in the world. I had seen what was coming along. On the evening of March 11th, 2020, I went to bed and woke up at 4:00 the next morning. I knew that there was going to be chaos and huge disruption in North America and Canada, where I live. I knew that we were going to be shutting down schools and so on. I knew that was going to happen. I asked myself, “What can I do to help? How can I help with this?“  

The answer that came to me in that moment was, “You can invite people to gather and hold a space for them to catch their breath in the middle of all this chaos.“ I was like, “That’s what I’ll do then.“ I started on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other places saying, “I’m going to be gathering with people every morning for fifteen minutes to get centered and tuned in. Who wants to come?” On March 12th, 2020, zero people came. Mostly because I put this out at 9:30 and it was happening at 10:00. On March 13th, 2020, you came. You were the only person who came.  

You were the first attendee of the Power Pause. That’s what this turned into, a daily gathering that we call the Power Pause. It has happened every day since then. It continues. We had a group of about 90 people who heard about it in the first couple of months and signed up to join. Not all of them came every day. What I’ve been experimenting with is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, which is create a space where people can come, get centered, tune inward, see what emerges, go off, and do whatever the day asks of them. That’s basically what we’ve been doing.  

Do you do it on the weekends too?  

For the first 111 days, we did it seven days a week but then July 2020 was upon us. I was tired. I thought maybe I should give myself a break on the weekends. Since then, we’ve been five days a week, Monday to Friday.  

What are you seeing emerge out of your Power Pause? What have you learned? What have people told you they get out of it? I’m super curious about the effect of doing something daily.  

It’s cool. I had no idea. I was just trying to be helpful. I’ve been a leadership consultant and trainer for years. I have delivered countless coaching engagements but also very structured leadership development programs that span over a year and have quarterly offsite for 2 or 3 days, all the one-on-one coaching that happens in between. I’m seeing that the effect of a daily pause, a daily connection point is potentially more powerful than any of those programs that I’ve ever delivered before. The transformation that you hope for out of those traditional programs is what I’m noticing in the Power Pause. I never noticed that before. If you go to training or you go to an event that’s a couple of days long, you have all these Epiphanes. You’re like, “I got to do that differently.“ You go back to work. You go back to life. Later, you’re not on top of it anymore. You forgot about it. Life takes over and you carry on.  

This is different. The people who are coming are saying that they are able to deal with unexpected crisis, difficult people, and events. When the events of the US Capitol happened in January 2020, one of my Power Pause members told me that she had clients who were calling her in distress, going crazy, so scared, and upset. She was able to help them to stay present, grounded, and not fly off into the disastrous ways that our thinking can take us. It’s helping people get more grounded and become more aware of themselves. What we’re learning through this process is potentially life-saving in its effect. If you can have something unfolding in front of you or around you that is chaotic or stressful and you can remain centered, then you can choose your actions from a very different place. That has threads that extend into. Look at the news, pandemic, racially motivated killings, mass shootings, all things that have happened. This has threads to the roots of the cause of all of that and potentially the solution.  

I’m super happy to hear how that’s gone for you. Speaking about the events, I know that you have shared on social media and some other places some of your journey around being a woman, a person of color, and leadership. You told a story about being a facilitator. Would you be willing to share that story?  

Staying Present: If you can have something unfolding in front of you or around you that is chaotic or stressful and you can remain centered, you can choose your actions from a very different place.

We were doing this facilitation where people ended up in small groups and they were practicing together. It’s a new skill that we had taught them. That was coach training. What we promise was that we would sit in with the groups if there was a moment where someone needed some guidance because we were teaching them some very advanced techniques. We would be there to help them. I was sitting with a pair that was working together. I noticed that the person who was practicing the new skill was struggling. It seemed to me that she was stuck. I began to intervene to give her some guidance. She put her hand up in front of me and said, “No.” On one hand, I want people to be empowered and at choice but on the other hand, when my co-facilitator, who was a white man, intervened with her, she did not do that. She listened to what he said. She took in his advice and tried to apply it.  

I don’t want to make up huge amounts of stuff about that but I want to say that is an experience that I have often. Also, my life partner worked with me for a short time. This was the story I told. We were working with a team. I would say something and they would nod. He would say essentially the same thing later and they’d be like, “That was so profound.“ That has been my experience over and over again. I don’t know why. I do think it has to do with being female, not having white skin, and those things play into this. I’m very compassionate. I’m always willing to say it takes a couple of times to hear something before it makes its way in and things like that. That happens consistently, years of this.  

In the example I gave you with my partner, he was brand new at this work. I had been doing it for many years at that time. There’s a rank that I had that was unacknowledged and unseen. I knew I had it because I’ve been in the game longer. He knew I had it because he’d been in the game shorter but they didn’t know because we didn’t talk about that very much with them. He automatically was accorded a certain rank and status that I would never have.  

I was with a team one time and there was a problem. It was a technical problem involving YouTube. I said, “You could do this. You could make it a private link.“ Everybody‘s eyes glazed over and kept on talking as if I’d never said anything. The twenty-year–old intern later said, “I think we can make that a private link on YouTube.“ They all went, “Oh.” I was like, “What just happened?” I was being incredibly well paid to be there in the room and still not able to bridge that gap to be heard. You’re super interesting because you’ve done the time. You are a highly skilled voice in a room that might not be heard. We’re not talking about institutionalized sexism or racism that kept you from getting to your position.  

You’re in the position. You’re a principal in your business. You’re a highly skilled coach. You have the certifications. You have done the work. You’ve done the thing. It’s a little different to look at what someone loses if they disregard your voice. I’ve worked with you. I know that you’re quite skilled at asking those hard questions and drawing people’s eyes to some of the things that they might not see. You might see things around privilege, marginalization, or equity seeking groups that I, as a facilitator might not notice because of who you are. You’re doing some cool work in your business around this. Can you tell us about that? 

George Floyd’s murder in 2020 shine a spotlight on something that I’ve been thinking about, sitting with, and living through for a long time. It’s very interesting to be me in this moment. I’m not black, I’m brown. I’m not American, I’m Canadian. I’m not young anymore. I don’t feel like I’m the youngest one around anymore. I feel like I’m in a category that you would consider a little bit older. In all these ways, there’s marginalization and privilege in all of them. These are hard things to talk about. One thing that I noticed right after, to your point, about I might see things that you might not, I see a lot and I’m very sensitive to all of it. I take it in very deeply. What I noticed right after his murder was that a lot of very well-intentioned people began to jump into the fray to convene groups, offer training, try to be part of the solution hugely good intention.  

A lot of those people, we would say they were white or maybe they identify as white. I don’t know everybody’s heritage if we go back to their ancestry. There was one person in particular who was gathering a large group of people to start to read some of the books. What I noticed when I observed all of this was that as a person who’s deeply sensitive to all of this, both from the inside and the outside, I felt that I wanted to slow things down a little bit. I almost had the feeling like in this world of extroverts and I would call myself an extrovert too, you have to be fast. When this happened, everybody quickly started to move. I need to sit a little longer. This is one of the practices that the Power Pause helps with. I believe that the most important thing any leader can do is evolve exquisite self-awareness in themselves, develop the capacity to sit still in the midst of it all, get grounded, focused, and let the action that come from a deeper place where you have sat with it a little bit longer.  

I thought that some of these people who were convening these things very quickly were operating. In your book, you talk about reactive. In the work that I teach, we talk about this too as a strategy. They’re reactive. It’s almost like the action is coming out of a compulsion to have to do something. What I say is what if we sit a little longer? There was one person that I know who was doing that, reactively jumping forward and convene a huge amount of people to do some good work. I’m sure it was very good. I asked her if she would consider slowing down. She said she would not consider slowing down. I began to write. When I am in that sitting deeply steeping mode, poems come through. I probably had already written a couple of them in the past. I ended up pulling out four poems. Mostly they came through after that time. I decided what I would do is I would invite people to gather, speak about these poems, and let the poem be the way into the conversation.  

I decided that what I did not want to do was do diversity, equity, and inclusion training where I went forward and taught lots of people new words. We read a book together. I don’t want to do that. That stuff is important and somebody should do it. People who don’t know vocabulary related to all of this should learn it. I have things to learn there too. What I wanted to do was go much more deeply into, “if you want to talk about oppression, then how are you oppressed and the oppressor?” For example, if you want to understand what’s going on, let’s dive into rank. Where do you have it? Where do you not? We all do and don’t have it depending on the circumstances. When you see people toppling monuments, riding in the streets and then the judgment is they’re perpetuating violence if there’s no outlet for rage but then it’s going to come out sideways, how do we begin to evolve our capacity to hold the rage of the oppressed and the oppressors? 

By the way, the last one was more about loss. I do believe that what’s underneath all of this is that intense fear of loss. I began to convene some small groups to inquire into these. Poems became the vehicle and that the doorway. We began to have these deeper explorations. I did four sessions, one for each of those in the fall. I had very few people. I’m not great at marketing. I’m good at doing my work but I don’t always get my word out in the most large way. We had about 5 or 6 people. For the most part, they were white. They were very willing to sit in these questions together. What I also did that is different is, I know there are a lot of people of color and I completely respect that. I say, “It’s not my job to train you about this stuff. You should learn it yourself.“ I feel differently. I feel like I want to teach you about my experience. I want you to understand my experience. It was so deeply painful. It is so much a part of the foundation of my journey.  

In my experiences, quite honestly, I feel invisible. You’ve done all this stuff and I know I have. I know I’m not invisible. There’s a community of people who are with me in many different ways and many clients who I’m so grateful to work with. After another shooting of a young black man who’s about the same age as my older son, it tears my heart. I noticed the same thing. People are jumping in very fast. The sitting is intolerable at times for people. If we don’t sit first, I don’t think we move as purposefully or as effectively into whatever’s next. We can apply this to the race situation, to the pandemic, and to work. Things that happen at work and leadership. I’ve been experimenting with that. I’m getting ready to offer it again and it will be soon, so stay tuned.  

I sat here pretty silently through all of that. I wanted to hold space for you to speak. There are so many things that you said that touched me. I want to unpack a little bit of what I noticed in what you said. Number one, I’m with you on the moving slowly. I have clients who sometimes were like, “Have you read this book?“ I might read one book. To thread it out through all of my clients, it might take me years but I love to implement the learning. This race thing has been fat for me. I want to be an ally as somebody who’s part of the LGBTQ community. It’s a place I don’t hold privilege but it’s less visible when I’m walking down the street. It touches our lives but differently. I do think the question that you asked about where do you hold privilege, where do you hold rank and where don’t you is relevant.  

I decided on my show that nobody is allowed anymore who isn’t willing to do the work, talk about both women in leadership and race in leadership, no matter what the color of their skin. There are white people work to be done to you. I love that term. What are the white people work I need to do? How do I do white people work with other white people? I’m committed to that. I’m also getting the piece about people. This happens in the LGBTQ community where whatever community you’re in. Somebody decides everybody should learn about it. Because you’re part of that group, it becomes your job to educate. I think of that sometimes as there are spaces where I’m willing to bring that identity and talk about it but you don’t get to ask me anything just because we’re friends. I always retain the right to say, “I’m not going to. It’s not about you.“  

I got tired of coming out to people after the mal transition end. I decided I wasn’t going to come out to the neighbors. I didn’t say anything. He showed up. We’d see him on the street. We’d talk to them and they’d figure it out. I bet they were a little uncomfortable but it was way more comfortable for me. It’s okay to give yourself permission to let others be uncomfortable. I love the poetry. I love the idea that there are other ways toward oppression work that you’re going to correct me or tell me the rules. How do we know the rules? Why is it your job to come up with the rules? That’s a lot of heavy lifting to solve a problem that isn’t a problem. You probably don’t participate in that oppression.  

I’m seeing that rage amplified in the dialogue. It scares me. It calls me forth. It helps me expand my thinking. It feels new. This amplification of rage. I don’t know that I feel the rage in the same way. It feels different than me. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s justified. It was justified a long time ago. I think that it’s a sign of solidarity growing so the foundation gets stronger. People who are oppressed are allowed to feel more rage. I hope that’s true. Do you have anything to say about all that? You can tell me. I’m totally off base and wrong.  

That’s the thing about how I want to work with this. I don’t get to have an opinion about your thoughts. I don’t want to. It’s not for me to judge what you’re saying. What I’m noticing is that I’m appreciating this dialogue that we’re having in large part. I’m hearing you and you’re hearing me. I know that you hear me but your response to me, both in the way that you chose not to say anything, even though this is a show and let me go on. Your sensitivity to that and then in the way that you’ve responded tells me that I’ve been heard. Honestly, if you want to know what I also think about leadership is leaders need to get better at listening in that way. In the end, we’re going to end up somewhere. What I’d love is for us not to end up in the same patterns that we’ve been embroiled in up to this moment.  

It’s not so much about where we end up within this moment. It’s more about how do we change the nature of the way that we relate to each other in this moment. That’s what my work is centered on. It’s less action–oriented in that sense because it’s not so much. We’ll be over there in the future and then it will be better because this and this will be there. I’m not working so much about that as I am about how we are being together in this moment. We’re in a time of finding what I call the third ways of being together. There’s a quote by Coleman Barks, who made his life work out of rendering Rumi poems. One of his renderings of Rumi’s work is one that lots of people are familiar with. “Beyond the right and wrong, there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.“  

That place isn’t right, isn’t wrong. That’s the third way. This work for me that I’m doing, whether we’re talking about race, how effective your team is at work, the relationship you have with yourself, and the shadow parts of yourself that you’d rather not have anything to do with, I’m in favor of a third way. For me, that has the experiments I’ve been running since last March of 2020 when this all started with the Power Pause, some new leadership programs for women, these deeper explorations into oppression, rank, rage, and loss. There’s a men’s program that’s in the works and some more training for coaches that takes coaches further into being able to hold space for all of this. What we’re up to is exploring these third ways together. I don’t know where we’re going to find ourselves. All I know is that it’s markedly different from the ways we’ve done it before.  

Staying Present: If there’s no outlet for rage, but then it’s going to come out sideways, how do we begin to evolve our capacity to hold the rage of the oppressed and the oppressors?

It’s interesting that you’re also looking at programs for coaches. I do feel like it’s a place that there’s very light tapping that can happen. That question of, how does race play into this for you? One of the big edges I had to go over in the last years around race was to be willing to speak of it as if it was something I cared about. I’ve always cared about it but I always felt like I might get it wrong. I had to realize I care enough to get it wrong. I may fuck up over and over again but I’m going to be in the fight. I’m going to be in there. It feels like sacred ground to me.  

That’s what I’m noticing. In case you were going to ask me what am I noticing, it’s that let’s take race out of it and talk generally about everything. When I talk about the third way, there are two ways that we’re very familiar with. One is driving and striving. The other one is disengaging and not doing anything. If we think about everything with that pattern in mind, what I’m noticing is that both of those things are over compensations for feeling inadequate like you’ve been talking about. I don’t want to get it wrong. Maybe I’ll be careful and not talk about it. What people do is they either overamp, control, and micromanage or they disengage, go passive and do nothing.  

The third way is to welcome it all. What I’m noticing is that people are coming into my world, my executive coaching clients, my Power Pause participants, and people at my group programs. They are arriving ready to put their metaphor co-weapons down. Whatever driving, striving, and pushing they’ve been doing, they’re willing to put that down. Whatever part of them sits back and stays out of it is also willing to be put down. They’re coming forward very willing to be wrong, curious, and learn. I’m noticing that as a theme. Every time I talked about this with people who know me, they say, “Don’t discount the part that you’re playing in that, Shahmeen.“ I also want to acknowledge, I am holding space in a particular way that welcomes it all.  

Someone is coming into any of these race-related conversations with me, if they come in with wrong terminology or an assumption that isn’t correct, I hold it all with great love and welcoming. At least we’re talking. What did we do before? We whitewashed it. That is not an accidental term, by the way. We whitewashed everything to make everyone feel more comfortable. There’s great value in being uncomfortable. You’ve got to create a safe space and a safe container where someone feels that way. It’s okay to not be right, have it wrong, and care about it but not know what to do about it. That’s huge.  

I’m noticing I’m very heartened, even though my heart is broken. I wrote a poem that’s very rich about how I feel. I’m still extremely heartened by the willingness that I feel here in my circles. At least where we are able to be with this in a whole different way that is going to lead us through to something that is unlike anything we’ve ever had before. I don’t know what it will look like. The hard part is people always want to know what am I going to get out of it? I’m not sure. I can’t say but I can say that this willingness to sink into it, to sit and dive a little deeper is incredibly helpful for me. 

You’ve coached lots of leaders. You’ve grappled with race. You’ve grappled with being a woman. Do you have any tips and tricks? How do you reduce invisibility? What do you know from your years as a leader grappling with this? How do we help new leaders take up more space?  

I work with the most senior leaders. When I’m working with leaders and organizations, I work with the top three levels, generally speaking. I think that the work is there. It’s not fair to say to a new leader, “You need to take up more space. You need to put your ideas on the table. You need to be louder.“ You cannot if the system is not designed to welcome that. I work with the most senior leaders to help them to create space. The easiest thing that anyone can do and anyone who’s reading this can try this. Put a timer on for one minute. Sit quietly for one minute. I know it sounds crazy. How would that help? We’re so reflexive. We’re so action-oriented. We’re so do–do–do. Very little attention is paid to being.  

The very first thing everybody should do is start adopting a breath break of a minute throughout their day periodically. The second thing is if you are too afraid to talk about this stuff then you’ve got to start talking about it with someone. Reach out to me. I’m a person who you can talk with, others who hold space for this kind of exploration. Find someone to be your ally and your guide in beginning to speak about these things. I had a situation where we were having a three-way conversation with a person of color that had been given a 360 assessment. I debrief them and discuss with them what the developmental opportunities were. We had a three-way conversation with that person’s boss, who was the person I was working with who was a person of color. The boss was white. 

In the conversation, we created space for that person to talk about their experience of being someone who was on a trajectory into leadership in a world of leaders that don’t look like that person who are all white and all male. This person being a person of color and a woman was able to say, “I never saw myself rising into that kind of role.“ Later talking alone with the leader, I talked to him about that. I said, “How do you create space for her to include that experience?“ He said, “Honestly, I don’t know how to.” He’s been amazing with her but he said, “I’m not sure how to talk about that stuff. What should I do?“ I said, “Start asking her some questions. Start talking with her about it.“ You see, people are so afraid because they don’t want to be wrong. You have to first find your own voice and be able to talk about this in a place that’s safe for you as a leader.  

Staying Present: Staying present is a big challenge for a lot of people. They can’t stay present. They get ungrounded by that.

How do you help others not be invisible? You start talking with them. Start listening to them. Start inquiring into what their experience is. That’s the way. The third thing I’ll say is how I talked about people coming in less defended and putting their proverbial or metaphorical weapons down. We could do that in our concrete world too. That would be great. It’s the work on undefending. Undefending is another big part of the work that I’m doing with leaders. It’s to help them to not need to defend against this. If someone says, “I’m black. This is my experience. I don’t see others like me in this world. I feel uncomfortable. I feel questioning. Do I belong?“ Don’t defend against it. Don’t try and point it on how they’re not. Don’t tell them you don’t see color. Invite that. Start asking more questions about it. This is what we have to do. We have to stop whitewashing. We have to start to have authentic conversations about what matters that are not about the leader trying to make it better. Leaders, if you did those three things, that would make a huge difference.  

My husband and I were talking. He’s one of the smartest people I know. He said, “When people are in pain and they want to be heard, the most effective thing you can do as a leader is to take the time to listen to them.“ It’s not that you pretend you hear them. You don’t say, “I get your point of view.“ You don’t tell them how it’s not right because you have another point of view. You just listen. You don’t have to solve their problems. You can go deeply with them in that moment and say, “I hear you.“  

This is why I say the first step is to get practiced at sitting quietly for a minute. Even that simple thing that you and your husband were talking about is so hard for leaders. What is their value tied up in? It’s tied up in what they do. That is the biggest defense that we could all be working on, letting go of, healing or undefending. I don’t have to do anything. If you are telling me about an experience you’re having, the biggest gift and the life–saving gift that I might be able to give you is to be present with you while you talk about it, to be interested in you while you talk about it.  

Not to try to solve it, not to try to fix it, or not to sweep it away because I feel uncomfortable but to welcome it. Honestly, if you can’t say anything and can’t even think of a question to ask, just stay present. That is a big challenge for a lot of people. They can’t stay present. They get ungrounded by that. Learn to sit, look inside, and tune into yourself. That’s why the Power Pause has been so amazing because people are learning to cultivate what I call exquisite self-awareness. That is the foundation of great leadership as far as I’m concerned.  

Thank you so much. The fact that you’re willing to do this work, willing to help people come, and do this work with you is a huge gift. Where can people find you?  

I’ve created a page for the readers of this show. It’s ThisHumanBeing.com/powerpauseel. That is the best way to find me. That will take you to the Power Pause. It will teach you a little bit more about what we’re up to there and share a little bit more about how it works. I’d love it if you join. We have a community that gathers every morning at 9:00 Eastern Time for 30 minutes. It’s amazing. It’s where you get to practice sitting tuning in. It’s completely welcoming non-judgmental. Everyone is welcome. The first month is free and then there’s a very nominal charge after that. If you decide you want to stay with us, then you can. If you want to try it out for a month, then you can do that too. 

Thank you so much for being here. It’s been such an amazing pleasure to get to spend time with you.  

Staying Present: It’s okay to not be right, have it wrong, and care about it but not know what to do about it.

Thank you so much, Melanie. I’m so happy that we did this. Thanks for the work that you’re doing with everything that you’re up to as well.  

—

I’ve enjoyed talking with Shahmeen Sadiq about race, women, leadership, and also the incredible power of the pause in leadership. Taking a minute to give yourself space and to prepare yourself for the work and thinking of leadership. She’s a brilliant coach and a brilliant program creator. I love how she talks about how the pause has the same effect as many of the leadership programs she’s delivered. It’s been so fun to hear her thoughts on this. It’s so deep and meaning to hear how brave we need to be as leaders as we try to go into subjects and talk about things that don’t come easily to us. This is Melanie Parish. Go experiment. 

Important Links: 

• Anjali Leadership 
• Shahmeen Sadiq 
• The First Unitarian Church of Hamilton 
• Power Pause 

About Shahmeen Sadiq 

I have been an executive coach and leadership consultant since 2005 when I founded Anjali Leadership Inc., in Toronto.

I teach leaders how to courageously relate to others with exquisite self-awareness and grace, and it is my privilege to work with leaders from a wide variety of industries including insurance, government, consulting, healthcare, education, banking, hospitality and faith organizations.

I have served as adjunct Leadership Faculty at the University of Notre Dame since 2013, and from 2008-2019 I was a faculty member of The Leadership Circle, where I certified and mentored about a thousand coaches across the US and Canada. In 2009 I was honoured by the International Coach Federation with a Prism Award for large system healing and culture change within a fractured organization.

People often ask me what I see as the biggest theme or challenge for organizations, since I’ve been working with leaders for over 16 years.

My response? It is always, ultimately, about people and how they relate to each other.

This observation cuts across industries, no matter the size or complexity of the organization. It has nothing to do with what product you make or what service you provide. It is true in higher education, in financial services, in hotels and in schools. It is the foundation for all the problems, and all the solutions, in faith organizations, insurance companies and hospitals. This holds true at scale – in families, in communities, in countries and across the globe.

It always comes down to people, relationships and communication.

And, the real, integrated and sustained change needs to begin at the top in order to create a culture of effectiveness.

The truth is, your leaders are setting the tone for everyone who works there. With every meeting they hold, every edict they proclaim (and how they live by these rules, or not), every decision they make, and every question they ask, they show everyone, “This is how we do it here”.

And all too often, “How we do it here” is causing great damage at work, at home and in our communities.

My team and I are focused on facilitating essential, intimate and challenging explorations with committed, courageous and resilient senior executives of purposeful organizations who will lead the world into and through the next chapter of human history.

I also mentor seasoned leadership development coaches and consultants and HR professionals who support such leaders and organizations.

And every weekday morning I host a daily Power Pause so that leaders can get grounded, centered and tuned in so that they can enter each day as their best, most intentional and conscious selves.

I have a dream. Your people are engaging with each other with courage, compassion, excitement and alignment. You create new things together that bring joy, justice and prosperity to the world. You do this with a sense of ease, aliveness and purpose that makes your lives and the lives of your loved ones truly enjoyable.

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